Blackberry CEO admits BB 10 is difficult to learn

It takes time to love Blackberry 10

It's something we raised in our initial reviews of the Blackberry Z10 and Q10, if you're not familiar with Blackberry 10 you may struggle to figure out how to use it at first.

Speaking during a press briefing at MWC 2014, Blackberry CEO John Chen admitted: "it took me a while to get used to Blackberry 10, but once I got used to it I loved it.

"The key is it took me a while to get used to it. For most consumers if they get to our new phone and it's not intuitively obvious they get a little shy and they don't want to continue using it.

"I think that's the number one thing Blackberry did. We did not do enough to educate the market about the interface [when Blackberry 10 launched]."

I'm all out of love

Chen also revealed that the firm's first Blackberry 10 QWERTY keyboard smartphone - the Q10 - wasn't as well received as they had hoped.

"Virtually everyone we speak to loves our keyboard," Chen explained "so we gave them the Q10. People didn't love it as much as we thought though, as they missed the trackpad and hard navigations keys 'belt' above the keyboard that were on the old Bold and Curve ranges."

Blackberry is addressing this issue with the launch of the Q20, which brings back the "belt" above the keyboard - but we'll have to wait and see if it's enough to swing people back towards the Canadian firm.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phones and Tablets Deputy Editor

John (Twitter, Google+) got his first phone aged 12 and since then he's been fixated on all things mobile, churning his way through a multitude of handsets, tablets and operating systems. Signalling his arrival at TechRadar by becoming a Guinness World Record holder in his first week (for the highest score on Super Mario Bros using a giant controller), John hasn't looked back since.